We looked at securing your email yesterday using PGP but what if you use a web-based email provider such as Google, Yahoo!, or Windows Live? The PGP method is great for securing your email client but won’t help you much when you’re using webmail. So how can we encrypt and digitally sign our webmail for free? By using GWEBS MailCloak, that’s how.

Why would you want to do this? You never know who may be eavesdropping and reading your email. Many webmail providers also store and index every email message their systems create, send, receive, pass along, etc. This is a problem because this index can be searched by users as well as Internet Service Providers. I’m not going to list all of the reasons why this is a bad idea but let’s put it this way: why give the webmail providers this kind of power, often without any accountability to its users, when you can secure your email easily and for free?

MailCloak is a great solution for people who use laptops to check their Gmail or Yahoo! mail on the go. It gets even better if you use Firefox. With Firefox you can install the GWEBS MailCloak plugin in about 5 seconds and set up your keypair in another 5 seconds. Before you try this, make sure your webmail provider is supported first by checking out the list of supported mail systems.

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